The BPI recently announced it would be removing the leaders of both its Content Protection Unit and Head of Internet Investigations. The music industry group has now hired fresh blood to head up its anti-piracy team. Tim Cooper, current Head of Operations at anti-piracy outfit NetResult, will join the BPI as Head of Content Protection after years of protecting the Premier League.

Despite sending notices requesting the removal of hundreds millions of links from Google’s search results, the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) consistently manages to do so without causing serious collateral damage.

While that accuracy is to be commended, the BPI is also famous for being involved in the wholesale blocking of hundreds of ‘pirate’ websites in the UK, regardless of the non-infringing content many of them index. It also has a reputation for being ruthless in prosecutions of people sharing files.

All that being said, the BPI’s anti-piracy team is one of the most effective out there so an announcement last December that there would be upheaval in the team came as something of a surprise. The heads of both its Copyright Protection Unit and Head of Internet Investigations would both be moving on following a restructuring exercise, the BPI said.

Now the industry group has revealed a key new addition to the team. On April 20, Tim Cooper will become the BPI’s brand new Head of Content Protection.

Cooper is currently Head of Operations at NetResult, a Thomson Reuters company doing business in the anti-piracy space. Established in 2000 and headquartered in London, NetResult describes itself as being active in the online monitoring and enforcement sector for intellectual property rights.

Cooper has spent a decade at NetResult and according to the BPI developed the world’s first anti-piracy service to combat live streaming and devised strategies to tackle live P2P networks and streaming platforms. Chinese operator PPLive was one of the main targets but since then web-based operations have swamped the market.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to look far to find instances of Cooper’s anti-piracy footprints on the web, in this instance threatening the operators of a site indexing clips of soccer games who sarcastically refer to Cooper as their “friend”.

But after 10 years with NetResult Cooper says he’s looking forward to working in the music sector.

“I am thrilled to be joining The BP‎I to head up its content protection work. I have worked in rights protection for over a decade and music has been a passion all of my life,” he said in a statement.

“I look forward to leading The BPI’s Content Protection team and working closely with its General Counsel to continue to develop and deliver The BPI’s world-renowned content protection services for record labels and performers.”

Interestingly, the BPI has also taken the opportunity to thrown down some general anti-piracy statistics concerning the UK, claiming it now has one of the lowest piracy rates in the world.

“The number of UK consumers visiting illegal sites has fallen to about half the global average, and is lower than any other technologically advanced country except the USA and Japan,” the BPI says.

However, as our article earlier today shows, pirate site blockades in the UK are faltering, at least temporarily, with key sites regained lost ground due to what appears to be technical issues at ISPs.